PUERTO RICO (By Jonathan Ewing, Associated Press Writer) November 7, 2005 —  The cargo ship had just arrived from South America when U.S. federal agents boarded with sniffer dogs, zeroed in on a 20-foot-long steel oxygen tank and hauled it away. An X-ray showed it contained nearly two tons of cocaine.

Using vessels ranging from small wooden launches to 140-foot cargo ships like the one agents raided at the Port of San Juan, traffickers are sending a wave of drugs into Puerto Rico. It has become a stepping stone to the lucrative mainland U.S. market, a place the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration now classifies as a "major Caribbean point of entry" for drugs.

Traffickers love Puerto Rico because after their drugs arrive on the island, they can be hidden amid regular cargo and shipped onward, bypassing routine searches because Puerto Rico is part of the United States.

"Once the drugs are in Puerto Rico, they're as good as in Kansas," said Lt. j.g. Eric Willis of the U.S. Coast Guard, which patrols much of the Caribbean in cooperation with other nations.

But not all the drugs leave the island. Traffickers often pay locals in drugs — cocaine, marijuana and heroin — for their cooperation in getting their shipments to the United States.

Puerto Rico, renowned for its palm-fringed beaches, rain forest and salsa music, is paying the price for being a way station in the drug-trafficking pipeline.

With the island of 4 million awash in drugs, murders have surpassed 600 this year, already nearing the 793 homicides reported for 2004, as small-time drug dealers battle for turf.

The island also has one of the highest HIV rates — about 27 per 100,000 people — in the United States, because of addicts sharing needles.

Addicts wander the cobblestone streets in tourist districts such as Old San Juan, injecting themselves with heroin near the terminal where gleaming cruise ships come to port and near La Fortaleza, the governor's residence in Spanish colonial times.

"If you like your heroin cheap, then this is the place for you," said David Reyes Ortiz, 34, an addict from New York, as he stuck a needle into his arm below a Virgin Mary tattoo.

Reyes, who was using free syringes offered by a needle-exchange group seeking to curb the spread of HIV, said he buys a fix of heroin for as little as $10. It is much more powerful than what he could find at that price on the U.S. mainland.

According to a paper by the United Nations office for Drug Control and Crime Prevention, Colombian gangs started distributing their heroin in Puerto Rico in the early 1990s to test its popularity, giving it away free with each sale of cocaine. "Very soon people who had until then only been using cocaine became regular heroin users — and regular heroin buyers," it said.

"It's cheaper here because it's closer to its South American source and it's here in large amounts," Jerome Harris, chief of the DEA's Caribbean division, told The Associated Press.

The Caribbean has long been a paradise for smugglers who take advantage of the many islands, crowded waters and weak law enforcement in countries such as Haiti.

Corruption has leached into the Puerto Rican police force, too, underscored by the arrests by federal agents of several police officers for protecting the movement of drugs.

Puerto Rico has some of the busiest ports in the United States, with about 1,000 containers entering through San Juan each day, according to the Coast Guard.

"It's impossible to monitor everything that enters the island," said Willis.

The DEA has estimated that as much as 20 percent of the cocaine that reaches the United States moves through the Caribbean, although that figure has varied over time. An estimated 75 percent is smuggled into the United States through Central America and Mexico.

The smuggling methods and routes traversing Puerto Rico are well established.

Speedboats and every other type of vessel carry Colombian cocaine to Puerto Rico from islands to the east such as St. Maarten and the U.S. Virgin Islands; and from the west from Hispaniola — shared by Haiti and the Dominican Republic, according to the DEA.

Authorities are left to play cat and mouse. In some cases, an intelligence tip crops up, as happened when the Antigua-flagged TMM Turango appeared in San Juan with conflicting paperwork that showed it en route to either Haiti or Mexico, federal agents said.

A task force that included DEA and FBI agents had focused on the ship for some time, and had even searched it once before — but found nothing.

On Oct. 5, however, the agents found 3,904 pounds of cocaine in the steel oxygen tank — one of the largest drug busts in Puerto Rico's history.

Agents believe the cocaine was loaded onto the boat by dock workers in Venezuela, behind the backs of the Filipino and German crew and the Greek captain.

In such cases, dock workers are on a drug organizations' payroll, or a drug cartel used false documents or paid a bribe to load the drugs onto a ship without proper inspection.

So far, no arrests have been made, but the agents felt they had made progress.

"Any time you seize thousands of pounds of any contraband, it's big," said Juan Mojica, a special agent with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, who participated in the raid. "I don't know if it will cripple the drug organization, but it was definitely a big blow to them."